Cures for Hunger by Deni Béchard (fun books to read for adults .txt) 📗

The red pocketknife my father had sent in his latest box of gifts had Vancouver printed on the side. I chose a stick from the shore and began paring away its branches to make a spear so that I could kill a poisonous snake and inspect its fangs. I’d keep the skull next to my bed as a reminder, and this would make me mean. No one would fuck with me anymore. I sawed at the wood, the blade close to my hand.

“Fuck,” I growled. I’d finished and hadn’t cut myself.

I pulled up the crotch of my pants so I could squat more easily, my heels in the mud as I waited for a son-of-a-bitch snake to come and fuck with me.

“Deni!” My mother was calling my name. I dropped the spear. I snapped the knife shut and ran back toward the trailer.

My brother and sister were inside, wrangling over toys that had just arrived. My father mailed them to a PO box my mother kept so that he wouldn’t know where we lived—“Not that it would matter,” she’d told me. “He could just wait for me there if he wanted. That worries me sometimes.” He’d been sending crammed packages, and she raged that he was giving us hundreds of dollars’ worth of junk but no money for food or winter clothes.

“Wait for me!” I shouted and slid like a baseball player into the mess of torn packaging. My name had been written on a box with the photo of a Formula 1 racer.

“Mine, fuckers!” I hollered as I grabbed it.

“Deni, stop swearing,” my mother said.

With a few strokes, I shredded the box. The remote-controlled car was bright red, and I slapped it to prove to myself that it was the real thing. When I put it on the floor and pressed the handset, it zoomed across the carpet and slammed into the wall.

“Whoa!” I shouted. “Check out its power!”

“Guys,” my mother called. “I want you to meet someone.”

A short, gray-haired man had appeared in the trailer suddenly, like a ghost.

“This is Dickie,” she said.

He had the coarse face of a drinker, the wire glasses of a smart kid, and cramped biceps like GI Joe. His Camaro was outside, and to my amazement, he sat at the table, lit up a Winston, and held it loosely in his lips, squinting through the smoke like a withered Marlon Brando.

“What’s the goodies you got there?” he asked.

“Presents from my father,” I said.

He blinked. “Wait a sec. I forgot I brought something myself.”

He went to the Camaro and came back carrying a Styrofoam package of chicken. I’d read a book in which a country boy took a pullet to a brothel, and from Dickie’s expression, I feared my mother might dance around in her bra.

But we were suckers. We gathered around the stove as she performed her alchemy—the flabby chicken breasts becoming prime white pieces the likes of which we rarely saw. The cramped kitchen smoked up with the fleshy reek of a truck stop, the sizzling as loud as rain on the trailer’s metal roof.

I would have felt grateful, but Dickie ate quickly, and I was just emptying my plate when he speared the last morsel from the pan. I wanted to jab my fork in his eye.

“Are you a window washer?” I asked, curious to see how many toes he had.

“What?” my mother said, and explained that he was a project manager for a phone company and she’d met him on a blind date. Afterward, once the dishes were in the sink, she told us to go to our rooms.

“Okay,” I said, and took my book bag. But I left the red racer on, parked under the table.

I slouched to my room and sat on my bed, holding the handset. As my brother spread out his homework, I grinned. He raised an eyebrow.

Though the walls were thin as milk carton, the eavesdropping wasn’t great. Dickie made small talk. He told my mother he’d had eight coffees while hanging out at the watercooler. She said, “Oh.” I wished she’d tell him something shocking about my father—why she was so afraid and why we lived in Virginia. But she didn’t. Then it got real quiet.

When the silence lasted almost a minute, I hit the accelerator on the remote control.

The engine made a zinging sound, the car banged into a wall, and my mother gave a brief shriek. Then she began shouting my name.

I stuck my head out the door and said, “Heh, heh.”

“Outside! Go outside!” she told me.

Dickie was smiling his yellow teeth at me, but his eyes were as still and unentertained as nailheads.

“Boys,” he said, cleared his throat and swallowed.

Evicted, I took my remote-controlled car into the early evening. I revved it along the street, making it do swift 180s and 360s.

Normally, I didn’t think much of the toys. They arrived, and I played with them until I got bored. But the car impressed me, its engine powerful, and I knew that my father had gone out of his way.

More than six months had passed since we’d left, and I’d never imagined that my mother would find another man. Whenever I thought of my father, I got angry and then remembered that I loved him. I wondered if he was living in the same house, in front of the TV by himself, his eyes cold and unfriendly. An image came to mind of him in a field, like a statue I’d seen in a book on archaeology, a figure alone in a vast desert, the features almost worn away. Nothing about him had ever made sense, and I wanted to forget him. But the red car zoomed along the street, hopping when it struck cracks.

A bowlegged boy approached, swiveling his head. His hair was buzzed close in the front and at the sides, and hung long in the back. His squat face, blemished and sprouting a patchy beard, made his bug-eyes all the more